RCUK-SEA Identifying trade-offs of changing land use for aquatic environmental and socio-economic health and facilitating sustainable solutions

东南亚国家（马来西亚，印度尼西亚，越南，泰国，菲律宾）的经济以及生活在该地区的人们的生活水平与海洋密切相关，海洋是通过渔业获得蛋白质和通过旅游业获得收入的宝贵来源。这些地区中的许多地区还拥有森林和泥炭地等宝贵的自然资源，可以采伐木材，转化为农业系统，并储存碳，从而调节我们大气的组成，降低全球变暖的速度。如何最好地从陆地系统中提取资源，同时对通过河流与之相连的沿海系统的影响最小，这是一个巨大的挑战;伐木和土地清理导致土壤进入河流和沿海沃茨，改变其透明度，改变渔业，最终将碳排放到大气中。要了解管理自然环境面临的这些相互竞争的压力的最佳方式，需要了解自然环境如何运作，以及使用这些系统的社区将如何应对可能的变化。把研究土壤、森林和河流的自然科学家和那些了解是什么驱使人们决定如何生活的社会科学家放在一起是一个巨大的挑战。但是，如果我们不这样做，我们只能理解问题的一半。因此，在本项目中，我们将对婆罗洲西部的沿海沃茨和河流进行采样，以评估其功能和健康状况，并通过问卷调查和访谈评估当地社区的需求。我们将通过一系列研讨会将项目的这两部分结合在一起，我们相信这将更好地帮助马来西亚科普环境变化，并以可持续的方式管理其自然资源。该项目的主要内容包括对一系列受干扰和未受干扰的河流和沿海沃茨进行采样，找出导致土壤流失到海洋环境中的关键过程，土壤会发生什么变化，它如何影响生态系统，并研究这些过程如何随着时间的推移而变化，以及人们对沿海土地的开发如何平行演变。

The economies of Southeast Asian countries (Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines), and hence living standards of people living in this region, are intimately coupled to the ocean which is a valuable source of protein via fisheries and income via tourism. Many of these regions also contain valuable natural resources in the shape of forests and peatland which can be harvested for timber, converted to agricultural systems and which store carbon thus regulating the composition of our atmosphere and reducing the rate of global warming. Working out best how to extract resources from terrestrial systems with minimal impact on the coastal systems that they are linked to via rivers is an enormous challenge; logging and land clearance leads to soils entering rivers and coastal waters, changing their transparency, altering fisheries and ultimately losing carbon to the atmosphere. What is needed to understand the best way to manage these competing pressures on the natural environment is information about how it functions and about how the communities which use these systems will respond to likely changes. Putting together the natural scientists who think about soils, forests and rivers with those social scientists who understand what drives people to make the decisions about how they live their lives that they make is a massive challenge. However unless we do this we will only understand one half of the problem. In this project we will therefore both sample coastal waters and rivers in western Borneo to assess their functioning and health and assess the needs of the local communities via questionnaires and interviews. We will put these two halves of the project together via a series of workshops which we believe will better help Malaysia cope with environmental change and manage their natural resources in a sustainable manner. Key elements of the project involve sampling a range of disturbed and Undisturbed rivers and coastal waters, working out the key processes which lead to the loss of soil into the Marine environment, what happens to it and how it affects the ecosystem and looking at how these processes have changed over time and how people's exploitation of coastal espouses have evolved in parallel.